Mrs. Swader AP Art
History
April 6th – April 11th (White Day)
Snow Make Up Assignment
**This assignment are to be completed digitally (answers typed in Microsoft Word or Open Office or this handout
printed out, written on, photographed/scanned) and emailed to Mrs. Swader at heather.swader@evsc.k12.in.us by
Monday, April 13th. You will have Monday, April 6th – Sunday, April 12th to work on this assignment.
**If you have any questions, Mrs. Swader may be reached from 2:30 – 3:30 each day after school in D118 and is also
available through the above email address at any time.
THEME: CHALLENGING TRADITION
FOCUS: Kandinsky’s Improvisation 28, Breuer’s Wassily Chair, Gropius’ Bauhaus, Mondrian’s
Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow, Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International,
Stepanova’s The Results of the First Five-Year Plan
ONLINE ASSIGNMENT: http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/de-stijl-mondrian.html
ONLINE ASSIGNMENT: http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/stepanovas-the-results-of-the-first-five-year-plan.html
POWERPOINT (located on My Big Campus): CHALLENGING TRADITION: BAUHAUS, DeSTIJL, and
RUSSIAN CONSTRUCTIVISM (Kandinsky, Breuer, Mondrian, Tatlin, and Stepanova)
Mrs. Swader AP Art
History
1. A second major German Expressionist group, _________________________________ (The Blue Rider),
formed in Munich in 1911. The two founding members, Vassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, whimsically
selected this name because of their mutual interest in the color blue and horses. At this time,
Kandinsky became one of the first artists to explore complete
___________________________________, as in Improvisation 28, painted in 1912.
2. Kandinsky fueled his elimination of representational elements with his interest in
_________________________ (a religious and philosophical belief system incorporating a wide range
of tenets from, among other sources, Buddhism and mysticism) and the occult, as well as with
advances in the sciences. He articulated his ideas in an influential treatise,
_______________________________________, published in 1912. Artists, he believed, must express
their innermost ____________________ by orchestrating color, form, line, and space. Ultimately
Kandinsky saw works like Improvisation 28 as evolving blueprints for a more
___________________________ society emphasizing spirituality.
3. Kandinsky was later hired by _______________________________ to work for the Bauhaus, a school
that aimed to train artists, architects and designers to accept and anticipate 20 th-century needs. The
Bauhaus complex at Dessau consisted of workshop and class spaces, a dining room a theater, a
gymnasium, a wing with studio apartments, and an enclosed two-story bridge housing administrative
offices. The design’s simplicity followed the architect’s dictum that architecture should avoid “all
romantic _____________________________ and whimsy.”
4. To encourage the elimination of those boundaries that traditionally separated art from architecture
and art from ______________________, the Bauhaus offered courses in a wide range of artistic
disciplines. The Vassily Chair, created by __________________________, exemplifies how furniture
design could be used to created a marriage between art and __________________________, one of
the aims of the Bauhaus philosophy that had its roots in utopian principles. The chair, emphasizing
machine-age technologies and mass production, was named after the artist
_________________________.
5. Dutch artists who shared a utopian ideal formed a new movement in 1917 and began publishing a
Mrs. Swader AP Art
History
magazine, calling both movement and magazine DeStijl (meaning “ _______________________”). The
group’s cofounders were the painters Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) and ___________________________
(1883-1931). These artists felt it was the new age in the wake of World War I was a time of balance
between individual and universal values, when the ____________________ would assure ease of
living.
6. Mondrian sought to purge his art of every overt
7. reference to ___________________________ in the
external world. He initially favored the teachings of
theosophy, but quickly abandoned the strictures of
theosophy and turned toward a conception of
nonobjective design- “pure plastic art” that he believed
expressed ________________________ reality.
8. Mondrian developed his theories for a style of painting he called _________________________ - the
“pure plastic art”. To express this vision he eventually limited his formal vocabulary to three
______________________ colors (red, yellow, and blue), the three primary ___________________
(black, white, and gray), and the two primary directions (____________________ and
______________________). With these, he believed he had the perfect tools to help him achieve a
harmonious composition.
9. In his paintings, Mondrian altered the grid patterns and the size and placement of the color planes to
create an internal cohesion and harmony. This did not mean inertia. Rather, Mondrian worked to
maintain a dynamic tension in his paintings from the varying __________________ and
________________________ of lines, shapes, and colors.
10. One of the most gifted leaders of the Productivism movement, an offshoot of the Russian
_________________________ movement. His Monument to the Third International honors the
____________________ Revolution of 1919, envisioning a huge glass-and-iron building that would
have functioned as a propaganda and news center for the Soviet people in the middle of Moscow.
Mrs. Swader AP Art
History
11. Within a dynamically tilted spiral cage, three
geometrically shaped chambers were to rotate around
a central axis, each chamber housing facilities for a
different type of governmental activity and rotating at
a different speed. The one at the bottom, a huge
cylindrical glass structure for
___________________________, was to revolve once
a
_____________________. Higher up was a coneshaped
chamber that would rotate ____________________
and
serve ____________________________ functions. At
the top, a cubic information center would have
revolved _____________________, issuing
____________________________________. The
design thus served as a visual reinforcement of a social
and political reality.
12. Varvara Stepanova became well known for her contributions to the magazine USSR in Construction, a
propagandist publication that focused on the industrialization of the Soviet Union under
____________________________, a ruthless dictator who took power after Lenin's death and who's
totalitarian policies are thought to have caused suffering and death for millions of his people.
13. Stepanova’s The Results of the First Five-Year Plan is a ________________________ that functioned as
an ode to the success of the First Five-Year Plan, an initiative started by Stalin in 1928. The Plan was a
list of strategic goals designed to grow the Soviet economy and accelerate its industrialization.
14. The letters are placed above the horizon as is a portrait of _______________________, the founder of
the Soviet Union. The cropped and oversized photograph shows him speaking; his eyes turned to the
left as if looking to the future. Lenin is linked to the speakers and letter placards at the left by the wires
of an electrical transmission tower. Below, a large __________________________ indicate the mass
popularity of Stalin's political program and their desire to celebrate it.
Mrs. Swader AP Art
History
15. Stepanova’s images are combined and manipulated to express the message the artist wants to convey.
For example, she often mismatches the ____________________ of photographic elements to create a
sense of dynamism in her images.
16. What was the end result of the Five-Year plan?
ADDITIONAL THEMATIC APPROACH: ART as PROPAGANDA
Address ways in which each of the following works operates as works of propaganda in terms of content
and style:
Varvara Stepanova. Illustration from The Results of the First Five-Year Plan,1932 CE, photomontage
(1) How CONTENT operates as propaganda:
(2) How STYLE operates as propaganda:
Forum and Column of Trajan. Rome, 106-113 CE
(1) How CONTENT operates as propaganda:
(2) How STYLE operates as propaganda: